IBM's Watson To Take On Jeopardy Champs

IBM is all set to let its supercomputer Watson compete against humans in the famous television game show Jeopardy later this month.

Watson will take on current Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, who have made hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money from the show.

Starting 14 February, the supercomputer will take on the two Jeopardy champions for three days straight.

Watson is built along the lines of the famous Deep Blue IBM supercomputer which beat world champion chess player Garry Kasparov in 1997. IBM claims that Watson is extremely powerful, taking only 3 seconds to answer complex live questions, whereas a normal home computer would take at least two hours to answer.

Jeopardy host Alex Trebek told The Guardian: “IBM sees Watson more like the computer in Star Trek" – able, in other words, to comprehend questions posed in conversational language and answer likewise. The idea is that it will also learn to understand tricksy human traits such as irony, jokes and puns.”